Reviews of Books

In comparison to the substantial corpus of Alfonso X el Sabio’s Marian verse, which comprises some 427 Cantigas, his profane poems are more limited in number, encompassing 39 poemas de escarnho e maldizer, 4 cantigas de amor, 1 cantiga de amigo and 1 cantiga de loor. As a result, his secular (indeed, lewd and sometimes even sacriligeous) verse has understandably received considerably less critical attention than his religious compositions, a situation this monograph seeks to remedy by making these poems more easily accessible through a single critical edition that for the first time brings Alfonso’s profane verse together in one volume, complete with detailed notes, translations into modern Spanish, and an informative Introduction. The latter provides a description and analysis of the manuscript sources from which the poems are taken, including a helpful insight into the practice of copyists, and how this explains many omissions and errors in the surviving manuscripts. Issues such as the possible ultimate destination of each manuscript copy, and the impact of the intervention of multiple copyists, are considered, so broadening the discussion’s relevance beyond the specific manuscripts and poems under scrutiny. The translations into Spanish, while superfluous to the specialist, make the poems more accessible to comparativists, or to other non-specialists who wish to gain a flavour of some of the bawdy compositions of the thirteenth century, and so again help to open the study out to a wider audience. The translations themselves flow easily, and they effectively capture the tone of the source texts. Following the analysis of the manuscript sources for these poems, the monograph proceeds to discuss the texts in more detail, scrutinizing the legitimacy of their claim to have been penned by Alfonso X, and the grounds for placing them into one of the four categories mentioned above. This task is made all the more difficult by the fragmentary nature of some of these compositions, but the evidence is explained and weighed carefully, and the conclusions drawn are solid. However, valuable though these more technical sections of the analysis are, perhaps the most insightful aspect of the Introduction is the light it casts on why these compositions have been largely neglected by scholarly criticism, a fact that cannot be explained exclusively as a corrollary of the relatively small space they occupy in Alfonsine literary output. Rather, Paredes points towards certain moral, sociological and aesthetic prejudices that have caused this verse to be overlooked, or at least misunderstood, by prevalent critical trends, and adduces Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque as the most apposite methodological tool with which to evaluate the apparent contradiction between the extreme piety of Alfonso’s Marian verse, and the utter obscenity of some of his secular compositions. The carnivalesque mode clearly shines through in poem number XXVII in the collection, whose surface reading as a description of how Juan Rodrı́guez wishes to take measurements to find out how much wood will be needed to construct a house for Marı́a Pérez is but a thin veil for a poem that lewdly explores the size of this ‘wood’ and the various women whose needs it has satisfied. Such raunchy material might seem out of keeping coming from the author of the Cantigas de Santa Marı́a, especially when the poem is directed towards Marı́a Pérez ‘Balteira’, whose services had probably been used by Alfonoso on more than one

contribution devoted to Don Quijote is something of an anomaly for this collection (Joseph V. Ricapito). Unlike the other articles, which are best suited for a specialist audience, this study of a 'Globalized Cervantes' is most appropriate for a reader who is approaching Cervantes' work for the first time.
All three of the essays devoted to the Novelas ejemplares are informative and well written. One study examines Monipodio's criminal community from Rinconete y Cortadillo in relation to the historical development of confraternities (cofradías) in early modern Spain (Christina H. Lee). This approach gives new insight into one of the most widely studied Novelas ejemplares, and the author's systematic and substantiated arguments are most effective. Also impressive is a study of El casamiento engañ oso that highlights Cervantes' points of contact with contemporary treatises designed to instruct readers on codes of conduct in urban society (María Augusta da Costa Vieira). Lastly, an attentive reading of El licenciado Vidriera explores the subtle manner in which Cervantes weaves social and ideological critiques into the fabric of his short stories, such as Spain's incipient decadence (William H. Clamurro).
There are two contributions not centred on the Quijote or the Novelas ejemplares. The first is an essay that examines Cervantes' literary debt to classic germanía in 'El rufiá n viudo llamado Trampagos', noting how he departs from tradition by humanizing stock literary characters on the margins of society, giving them depth and complexity (Carmen Y. Hsu). Francisco Má rquez Villanueva's 'Don Juan, de Tirso a Molière' is the sole essay not directed toward Cervantine studies. It traces the historical development of the Don Juan myth in Spain, Italy and France and convincingly argues that Tirso's version ought to be considered as something more than a mere 'precursor' to Molière's better known rendering.
Despite the lack of uniformity and a distracting number of typos, this collection includes numerous worthwhile essays on Cervantes and his time. The studies illustrate current trends in Cervantine scholarship and reveal how Cervantes' works lend themselves to a surprising variety of productive analytical approaches. RYAN  The appearance of the octava and décima partes of Lope de Vega's dramatic works, first published in Madrid in 1617 and 1618 respectively, marks something of a milestone for ProLope's prodigious project, directed up until recently by Alberto Blecua and Guillermo Serés, at the Autònoma in Barcelona. In the primera parte (1604), published by ProLope in 1997, the general editors wrote of a thirty-year project which would produce 105 volumes of plays in total. The contents of the twenty-five partes are to appear before further volumes of plays taken from other publications containing Lope's dramatic works, miscellaneous collections or manuscripts. With Parte IX*the first for which Lope himself can be said to be properly responsible*already published (in 2007, coordinated by Marco Presotto), these two partes bring to 100 the plays ProLope has edited in twenty-six volumes so far. Alongside the partes, the ProLope group has now published fifteen volumes of the Anuario Lope de Vega since the first in 1995. Volumes XIV (2008) and XV (2009) contain articles from the 2008 conference 'Lope polemista', held in Barcelona, but also further texts and reviews. The journal has become essential reading for lopistas and students of Golden-Age drama. Additionally, in something of a departure, they have published an excellent critical edition of El castigo sin venganza, aimed at students and based on a production of the play by Compañ ía Rakatá .
Partes VIII and X follow the clear norms established by the editorial team in most respects. Each parte is introduced by its general editor who traces its editorial history and describes the early printed editions. Then each of the twelve plays (four per volume) is introduced by its own editor(s) in a prólogo usually stretching to some fifteen or twenty pages. The prólogos vary, as might be expected, in tone and coverage, but deal with sources, dating, genre and textual problems particular to the individual piece (including justification for the choice of base text) and finish with a brief plot summary and a synopsis of the verse forms employed. Since the first parte appeared in the 1990s the explanatory endnotes have changed to become footnotes and are generally more numerous, and the individual editors now tend to cover more ground than was originally the case in their introductory prologues. Each play-text is followed by a list of variants and a 'nota onomá stica', and some plays in the décima parte have additional appendices containing Lope's source material. Each parte then ends with a list of the original errata and a consolidated bibliography.
The octava parte whose best known works are probably El anzuelo de Fenisa and El niñ o inocente de la Guardia, was the last to be published without Lope's close involvement and overt approval. The last straw for Lope was the action of entrepreneur Francisco de Á vila (or Dá vila) who had been buying up manuscripts of the playwright's works from autores de comedias, having them published and turning a nice profit. Lope's court action against him may have failed but by partes IX and X the playwright was in control of publication and was keen to contrast his own reliable texts with the poor quality ones others had published under his name. It is not surprising then that the texts of the octava parte are problematic: they often come from old manuscripts of plays that had been exhausted by the troupe that owned them. Nevertheless, the general editor, Rafael Ramos, speculates that de Á vila (or some other controlling hand) did take some care in putting his collections together, especially in attempting to balance the kinds of plays included in this parte (and the séptima). The idea is an interesting one but difficult to prove conclusively.
The overall standard of the editing in the octava parte is commendably high, with texts being clear and sensibly annotated. There are, however, some problems with the page numbering included in the indices to the second and third volumes. The prólogos are often of great interest although there is considerable variation in approach and several editors (for example those introducing Los locos por el cielo, La prisión sin culpa and La imperial de Otón) ignore the original intention of the general editors of the series not to pass aesthetic judgment on the works in their care. The bald assertions of Menéndez y Pelayo have not disappeared altogether. Marcella Trambaioli, by contrast, in her comments on Angélica en el Catay, shows a great sensitivity to the work within its original context, understanding that its subject matter may not be to modern critics' tastes, but that that does not make it a bad play.
Like the introductory study to the octava parte, the equivalent to the décima parte, coordinated by Ramón Valdés and María Morrá s, is full of fascinating information about its textual history, in this case including Lope's own involvement, the context of the Expostulatio Spongiae and the playwright's preliminary address 'al lector'. The editors believe that the twelve plays might have been arranged with a 'criterio de dotar de coherencia a los volú menes (a algunos de ellos, al menos) de acuerdo con una estrategia económica y autorial en busca de mecenazgo y de una fama con perfil literario' (15). Thus this volume, like some of the other contemporary partes, sheds light on the (self-)fashioning of Lope as a professional writer. The plays are now, their author claims, 'sacadas de sus originales', although this is not the guarantor of clean, authoritative texts that one might expect. Even Lope had to go in search of his manuscripts and was not necessarily painstaking in his editorial work.
As it happens few of the plays from the parte X are well-known even to Golden-Age scholars, but they are mostly works from a more mature period*the decade leading up to 1618*, and in most cases they were plays kept by the Duke of Sessa, Lope's patron, in his library. Once again the individuals, or pairs of scholars, who introduce and annotate the plays, produce work which is reliable, informative and intelligent. These editions are excellent starting points for scholars to work from, full of useful bibliographical references and good leads. There is occasional repetition of material, especially about early editions and manuscript copies of the parte, but this is an occupational hazard when a team is involved and the advantages of the 'many hands' approach are palpable. Indeed, the expertise of the team is beyond question and the overall enterprise is an outstanding achievement to date. May the good work continue for the next hundred plays and beyond. The combined themes of war, religion, assimilation and Muslim-Christian relations in Calderón's Amar después de la muerte recall today's headlines and editorial pages, and while Jorge Checa acknowledges these resonances, he focuses firmly on the past. One soon learns that this is the ideal approach, as the 'morisco problem', as represented in both early modern historiography and literature, can be as thorny as any related topic taken from our modern political and cultural debates. Amar después de la muerte tells the story of the 1568 Alpujarras uprising near Granada, during which the Christianized moriscos were faced with an agonizing choice: peacefully abandon their Arabic language and customs forever, or fight to the death in order to preserve them. The play's action centres around the morisco protagonist Don Á lvaro Tuzaní, who navigates the war-torn terrain of the Alpujarras, managing to avoid death only to see his beloved bride killed at the hands of a ruthless Christian soldier. Checa reminds us that the debate about the moriscos did not end in 1609 with their expulsion, and in a parallel fashion, the debate about Amar después de la muerte's possible message continues even after three critical editions in the last twelve years. As this comedia portrays the horrors of war and contains a sympathetic morisco protagonist, different researchers have seen it as either antiwar, pro-morisco, or even subversive. The editor does not share this simplification of Calderón's ideological stance, and instead artfully employs the crónicas to reveal a much more complex interplay between historiography and literature. Readers may be surprised to know, for example, that some accounts in the crónicas were more horrific, especially regarding the suffering of women and children, than Calderón's own descriptions. This brings up the question: if the playwright were either anti-war or pro-morisco, why did he withhold details that might have supported one of these agenda? Checa explains that as a baroque author, Calderón's 'visión conflictiva y parcialmente desencantada' (75) would have seen the suppression of the moriscos as 'sangrienta, pero también necesaria' since their uprising threatened to radically subvert the political and religious legitimacy of the state. Amar después de la muerte's creator is neither a protester nor a propagandist, but rather a resigned realist chronicling a Europe-wide centralization of power maintained through standing armies that lack discipline and are prone to violent excess. As part of his analysis, Checa is careful not to ignore literary influences that intertwine with the crónicas' role in the construction of the play. Á lvaro Tuzaní is a name and personality partially taken from historian Pérez de Hita's writings (as well as the unpublished Porcel manuscript), but the play's protagonist also owes a literary debt to the figure of the 'moro sentimental', most famously represented by El Abencerraje's Abindarrá ez. However, since Á lvaro is a post-1492 morisco rebel, and not a medieval frontier nobleman, he has no hope of being integrated within any form of Spanish society. This makes him a tragic hero, admired even by his enemies, but unable to save his people. Checa's technique of tying together the threads of literary tradition, historical portrayals, and political reality, is employed to great effect with other characters and situations as well. As a result, the critical introduction becomes much greater than the sum of its standard parts, whether these be detailed summaries of the play's 'cuadros', a series of historical briefs, or examples of poetic license taken not only by Calderón, but other writers as well. Even the apparatus for variants is discussed critically, as a disagreement among comedia scholars continues about whether to favour two 1677 printings or the 1691 Vera Tassis edition. Checa sides mostly with Vera Tassis, and he convincingly defends his decision without ignoring a single choice, correction, or omission made by others, including Hartzenbusch, Valbuena Briones and three very recent editors. One of these, Ruiz Lagos, has argued that changes in the 'VT' edition were made to erase signs of Calderón's supposed sympathy towards the moriscos' suffering. Checa is highly sceptical of this hypothesis and, as always, carefully explains his choices without denying that editing decisions can be motivated in the way Ruiz Lagos has suggested.
Aided by the comprehensive and thought-provoking introduction, and continually assisted by extensive historical and vocabulary footnotes, any reader of this new Reichenberger edition will come away with a richer understanding and appreciation of the work and its historical context, but also something more. One comes to realize that the multiple points of view concerning the morisco uprising at Alpujarras and its historicalliterary representation are nothing new, and this edition keeps us from mistakenly thinking that only the themes, and not also serious reflection upon these themes, are what bridge a span over centuries of conflict and accommodation. Traducció n y cultura: la literatura traducida en la prensa hispá nica (1868 Á 98). This volume consists of thirty-two chapters which focus on translations published in the Spanish press during the fin de siglo. The introductory chapter, written by the editors, Marta Giné and Solange Hibbs, is followed by an insightful and thought-provoking piece by Jean-François Botrel, entitled 'La literatura traducida: ¿es españ ola?'. Thereafter the volume is divided into four main sections. The largest section consists of eighteen chapters, which explore the translation and reception of French literature in the Spanish press. The next two sections, each containing four chapters, are devoted to Russian literature and English literature respectively, whilst the final section, also consisting of four chapters and written in Catalan, deals with literary translations in the Catalan press. The nature and significance of the translated works of major authors, such as Daudet, Maupassant, Tolstoy and Zola, in the Spanish press are explored and the contributors to this volume focus on their reception in a variety of periodical publications, including important newspapers such as El Imparcial and El Liberal, illustrated publications like La Ilustración Españ ola y Americana and Madrid Cómico and major reviews such as the Revista de Españ a, the Revista Contemporá nea and La Españ a Moderna. The role and importance of translations in lesser known periodicals, such as La Diana, Luz and La Escuela Moderna, are also examined.
The decision to include multiple pieces on the same publications and authors naturally results in both overlap and repetition and it appears that it was difficult to assign some pieces to particular sections. Al-Matary's chapter on 'Daudet contra Tolstoi', for instance, appears within the French section despite the fact that, as indicated by the title, it pays equal attention to the Russian author. Some readers may also be surprised, but not necessarily disappointed, to discover that the volume is not confined to the analysis of written texts but that artistic works are considered, for example in Lola Bermú dez's 'Apuntes sobre pintores franceses en La Ilustración Españ ola y Americana (añ os 1888Á1898' and Marta Palenque's intriguing piece on 'La recepción del prerrafaelismo en ''la gente vieja'' a través de la prensa (1880Á1898)'.
Although it was not to be expected that the authors should provide detailed studies of particular reviews here, particularly given the space constraints placed on their pieces within this volume, it is surprising that some do not fully exploit the research material available for consultation. The majority of the authors who focus upon La Españ a Moderna do not mention the Copiadores de cartas (the correspondence written by José Lá zaro Galdiano), which are held in the Fundación Lá zaro and contain a wealth of information on the general editor's intentions for the publication during particular periods, his views on translations, his interest in particular authors and his relationship with the contributors and translators.
A number of the chapters in this book are tantalizing and reveal some interesting findings but the volume, as a whole, consists largely of a series of independent, frequently short (and thus somewhat disconnected) studies. Whilst researchers with a particular interest in a specific publication may enjoy consulting the relevant chapters separately, the reader setting out to digest the whole work may find it difficult to appreciate wholly the significance of the translated works within the context of the individual publications studied or to evaluate fully the nature of the role and the tasks faced by the translator at the turn of the century. This book will constitute a useful starting point for those commencing their investigations on translations during this period but this fascinating area of research still waits to be explored in the depth that it deserves.
It is good to find someone undertaking a serious study of one of the most provocative essay writers of the early twentieth century. Sadly, this is a posthumously published work, based on the author's PhD dissertation at Columbia University written under the direction of Gonzalo Sobejano, who contributes a brief semblanza, and prepared for publication by Professor Sara Parkinson de Saz. The essays examined are those from Tablado de Arlequín, Nuevo tablado de Arlequín, Juventud, egolatría, and Divagaciones apasionadas, with some attention also paid to Las horas solitarias and La caverna del humorismo. Saz Parkinson classifies the essays, grosso modo, as either Nietzschean or Schopenhauerian. Generally speaking the earlier essays find Baroja at his most Nietzschean. He inveighs against traditions that inhibit individual action. The question arises of whether an essay such as 'El culto del yo' is representative of Baroja's own beliefs or whether he is writing to épater les bourgeois. According to Saz Parkinson the explanation for Baroja's often outrageous remarks lies in the writer's ironic stance: 'The ambiguity resides in the fact that Baroja is torn by a double drive pushing him simultaneously in the directions of compassion and egoism' (93). I think this is very probably so. Baroja's writerly mask (which I once referred to as an ironic membrane) makes it hard to pin him down. Saz Parkinson, referring to 'Dulce egoísmo', sees the text as functioning on three levels: the Nietzschean surface text which denounces compassion as a weakness; the underlying subversion of this 'strong' view by means of ironic devices; and the overall balance which leaves the readers in a sea of uncertainty as to the author's real intention. Saz Parkinson attributes this ambiguity to a conflict waged within Baroja between the Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian attributes to life. But it is the latter that ultimately prevail because, as Saz Parkinson explains in a key passage, 'the Dionysian state requires a certain amount of credulity, perhaps a capacity to lie to oneself, the Nietzschean will to lie as a way to affirm life' (130). Although both tendencies co-exist, the later volumes of essays are rather different in tone from the self-affirmative essays found in Juventud, egolatría, adopting instead a more resigned, distant, poetic tone. Yet resignation does not bring spiritual calm. Baroja never found the yearned-for ataraxia. The heart of the book is in Chapters 3 and 4, which examine Baroja's essays in some detail after two initial chapters on the essay as form and on Baroja's encounter with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. I find Saz Parkinson's reading of Juventud, egolatría, which belongs to Baroja's more Nietzschean stage, thoroughly perceptive. He points out that while some essays convey a categorical and self-assured stance, others reveal the doubts behind Baroja's Nietzschean posturings. What emerges from Juventud, egolatría is that 'truth and identity are revealed as having slippery foundations' (119). In his more moderate essays, where a Schopenhauerian outlook predominates, Baroja is no less critical, his dissatisfaction with the Spain of his day coming through strongly (for example with the way Spanish women were brought up to value domesticity over culture and education). But he no longer pugnaciously denounces conventional morality. Gorki and Nietzsche are now seen as moral rebels to be enjoyed for their pathological eccentricity rather than for their relevance to social conditions. Saz Parkinson explains that Nietzsche ceases to be a beacon, becoming instead 'a subject to be studied, an interesting specimen for Baroja to examine at a safe distance' (128).
Having studied Baroja's essays in some detail, Saz Parkinson turns in his fifth chapter to selected novels and uses them as comparators, concluding that Baroja comes across as a very different writer. He ascribes this to a reversed Nietzsche-Schopenhauer axis: novelistic characters that represent Baroja himself are Schopenhauerian; conversely, characters that are Nietzschean are portrayed negatively and end in failure. I do not find this generalization wholly convincing. To take but a single novel, El á rbol de la ciencia, Andrés Hurtado, a committed Schopenhauerian, fails to cope, whereas his uncle Iturrioz, more Nietzschean than Schopenhauerian but also sympathetically portrayed, adapts perfectly to a humdrum environment. Open to debate, too, is Saz Parkinson's classification of Quintín, Zalacaín, and César as Dionysian failures: do they fail or are they rather defeated by a despicable and treacherous environment? On the other hand, Saz Parkinson's argument that in his novels Baroja is repeatedly led by ethical considerations which are seldom displayed in his essays seems to me to be entirely correct.
The question of Baroja's sincerity looms large in Saz Parkinson's meaty conclusion. After decades of critics applauding Baroja for his sincerity there has been a recent tendency to accuse him of insincerity. Tant pis for critics who cannot tell art from attestation. In art sincerity is a red herring, quite rightly recognized as such by Saz Parkinson. But essays are a different vehicle, he argues. Here the Dionysian side of Baroja comes through powerfully in many of them, reflecting Baroja's ideals and the Nietzschean qualities he admired but did not recognize in himself. These essays are not a sign of insincerity but rather 'require a revision of the very notions of ''sincerity'', ''truth'', and ''reality'' when applied to an essayist' (251), words of wisdom from a young scholar which deserve to be taken seriously.
If I have a substantive criticism of this book it is that it relies overmuch on a sharp generic distinction between essay and novel. What characterizes early twentieth-century literature is its generic hybridity. Unamuno, Baroja, Azorín, Pérez de Ayala, all wrote fiction that looked a bit like essays, and essays that looked a bit like fiction (as of course did many novelists elsewhere, for example Aldous Huxley in England or André Gide in France). This reservation apart, Saz Parkinson's book offers a very suggestive and readable account of Baroja the essayist, and I for one would wish to express my sympathy to the family and friends of the author for the loss of such a promising Hispanist and my gratitude for the effort involved in bringing to light his valuable contribution to Baroja studies. Valle-Inclá n's status as a Galician writer who produced almost all of his work in Castilian continues to prove problematic for critics, intellectuals and other groupings who seek to determine a definition of Galician literature and a canon within that categorization based on the language of composition. However, the presence of Galicia in Valle's aesthetic universe and universal concerns is diffuse and almost omnipresent, and therefore any examination of its influence and role promises a contribution to scholarship centred upon Valle. The objective of Ann Frost's study is to examine the elements that provide significant links in Valle-Inclá n's writing between 1889 and 1922, works that share the common backdrop and setting of Galicia. It intends to demonstrate in this way that works that have no apparent connection are in fact part of a larger expanse within Valle's oeuvre. Frost endeavours to identify a unifying pattern of unity and continuity across perspective, genre and aesthetic. Frost reminds the reader at an early stage of the impossibility of attempting to compartmentalize almost any element of Valle's work. A large section of the prologue is given over to a discussion of Spanish theatre during Valle's early career. This is interesting in its own right although its immediate relevance to the central theme of the study is not made clear. The prologue provides a summary of Valle's work and also some biographical detail, although this is not accompanied by in-depth analysis. Several culturally-specific terms, such as foro, are not explained for the non-specialist or undergraduate reader in spite of being mentioned several times. Similarly, there is a notable lack of discussion regarding the chronology of the publication and seasonal settings of the Sonatas, and how these reinforce the overarching motif of decadence and decline.
Frost assesses brilliantly Valle's parody of Bradomín and other characters as a forerunner of the Esperpento aesthetic; her comparison of the weakness of male characters in Valle's work with the emergence of strong, libertine women is equally accomplished. Valle's development of character, in terms of frequency, archetype, role, range and depth is fully chartered and the reader is made aware that the narrative focus falls not just on the aristocracy but also all social classes in tandem with a broad concern for national matters. This would have been an opportune juncture to discuss his relationship with the so-called 'Generation of 1898' and to what extent his radically different approach to national criticism conditions the concept of such a generation. Frost goes on to analyse adeptly how Valle writes himself into the tradition of featuring recurring characters in his work, a tendency initiated by Balzac and then imitated by Zola, Galdós, Pardo Bazá n, Proust and Faulkner, and how Valle's innovation was to apply this to theatre. Her study excels at charting the differences between different works that rework the same theme, plot or characters across different genres. 'The merging of genres is especially true of Valle-Inclá n's work', she observes; 'His prose was theatrical in nature from the start; many of his early short stories vacillate between narrative and dialogue, and contain striking elements of the theatre in their use of movement, sound, colour, light and dark, even touch and smell, and especially in the importance given to the spoken word' (77). Similarly, she includes an important reminder that Valle produced theatre in the first decade of twentieth century that anticipates German Expressionism by several years, making his works at this time 'inexplicably avant-garde' (124). Whilst she convincingly describes how Valle revolutionized Spanish theatre and literature autonomously with the first two instalments of the Comedias bá rbaras, and summarizes critical opinion on this, she fails to make her own position entirely clear.
There are other minor failings: occasional repetitions, a falling back onto often descriptive exposition, and the identification of aims in the prologue could be more specific. Whilst it offers an incisive reading of the aesthetic differences of Cara de plata and its coherence within the overarching plot and structure of the Comedias bá rbaras and characterization, lesser but important detail is not addressed, such as the anti-semitic depiction of El Señ or Ginero.
What is most striking about Frost's study is the absolute failure to mention postmodernism or indeed to acknowledge Valle's conspicuous anticipation of many of its characteristics in his work. In Chapter 1 she identifies features of early work that still recur throughout: modernism, musicality of language, juxtaposition, dehumanization and caricature. Valle's self-plagiarism is referred to but not discussed in significant depth regarding postmodern patterns, whilst the tendency in his work towards textual hybridity, repetition, and recycling and development of characterization, as well as the pivotal dependence of his developing aesthetic on an explicit sense of intertextuality could be explained better as part of an underlying and instinctive artist bias towards an avant la lettre postmodernism. However, this work is a valuable resource in the library of Valle-Inclá n studies and will be of value to the undergraduate and professional scholar alike because of several incisive textual readings that it performs. With lucid commentary on poems by García Lorca related to poetics, to art, and to literary creation, this book draws attention to a phenomenon about which Lorca scholars have written little: his development of a sense of self as a poet. Surveying the poetry from Libro de poemas to the Sonetos de amor oscuro, Federico Bonaddio posits an inner struggle on Lorca's part: on the one hand, the creation of a poetic self whose abiding impulse is to 'divulge the secrets of his soul' (37); on the other, the desire, at certain moments, to remove that self from his work. Bonaddio places this struggle in the context of the Hispanic avant-garde's rejection of modernismo and T. S. Eliot's dictum that 'the poet has, not a ''personality'' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in particular and unexpected ways' (36).
In an introduction more personal in tone than is common in books like this, Bonaddio confesses that a similar struggle has taken place also within him, as reader and as critic. An initial period of innocence, admiration and wonder over Lorca's imagery was followed by the critical reflection that led to this book, where, in six chapters, he leads us through Lorca's poems and statements on art and studies 'self-consciousness' as a dynamic part of his aesthetics. In Libro de poemas, for example, a desire for sincerity and spontaneous expression competes with 'the pull [. . .] toward more impersonal forms of expression' and 'the extinction of personality' (29). Those 'impersonal forms' are evident in Suites and in Poema del cante jondo; the latter is less about a landscape or about 'real' objects than about their verbal representation. In Canciones, too, Bonaddio detects 'a movement, however laboured, toward dehumanization and the extinction of personality' (95). Throughout Romancero gitano he notices a tension between the natural world with its uncontrollable forces, and the civilizing power of order and reason. The story of Preciosa in her escape from the 'viento verde', or that of the 'monja gitana' suggests the struggle 'of keeping nature at bay and ordering and fashioning its raw material into art' (110). 'Self-consciousness' takes a different turn in Poeta en Nueva York, where the lyric subject assumes a bold prophetic voice absent from earlier works and combines personal concerns with those of social groups. In Divan del Tamarit 'the human begins to regain its legitimacy in the face of the dehumanizing effects of modernity' (173) and in Llanto por Ignacio Sá nchez Mejías 'poetic control' is no match for 'lyrical outbursts of real grief ' (183). And yet, in many of the Sonetos de amor oscuro 'an inordinate emphasis on device appears to be getting in the way of feeling ' (192).
In tackling the theme of poetic 'self-conciousness', Bonaddio awakens a dizzying number of dichotomies: reason and emotion; logic and intuition; sincerity and authenticity (a distinction made by Lionel Trilling); self-expression and self-concealment; the desire to win recognition from others and the hunger for 'originality and self-differentiation' (14); personality and impersonality; artifice and spontaneity; life and art; the man and 'the poet deep within the man' (196). Any of these pairs, carefully questioned and historicized, might have provided material for an entire book, and it is not surprising that at moments the author seems extremely attentive to the poem at hand but disconnected from his theme*the poetics of self-consciousness*a concept he never defines with precision. I also wonder whether Lorca's lyric subject can be studied in depth without relation to his lyric addressees (the creation of an 'I' requires a 'you') and with only minimal reference to the theatre; after all, Lorca worked out his poetics not only on the page but in plays like El amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, La zapatera prodigiosa, Doñ a Rosita la soltera and even La casa de Bernarda Alba, where poetry struggles for survival in a world of black and white.
There are also a few lapses in textual history, attributable perhaps to Bonaddio's use of the 1986 Obras completas edited by Arturo del Hoyo for Aguilar (now a venerable relic) rather than more recent and accurate editions. Lorca's own lecture on Primer romancero gitano dates from 1935, not from 1926 (103); the poem '[Yo]', from December 1920 (see pp. 57Á58), cannot really be considered a suite, and if Bonaddio wishes to treat it as such, its four parts should be referred to as poems or segments or variations, but not 'suites', the term Lorca used for a complete sequence. The revision of Suites took place over many years and the elimination of certain poems from certain suites, at moments Bonaddio does not identify, tells us little about the historical development of Lorca's poetic self-consciousness (see 53Á54, 56). Despite these textual lapses, this is an insightful book*one which does justice to the author's initial sense of wonder* on a subject worthy of further study.
Ademá s de criticar a la Falange, en los ocho cuadernos en los que se divide el diario, escritos desde el 1 de noviembre de 1936 hasta el 4 de mayo de 1939, Gonzá lez Posada ofrece sus impresiones de las distintas zonas y ciudades por las que pasa: Madrid, Valencia, Burgos* tras su estancia en San Juan de Luz*y San Sebastiá n. El diario se cierra de manera circular al retornar el autor a la capital una vez tomada por los rebeldes. Del Madrid republicano, Gonzá lez Posada enfatiza los constantes bombardeos, la falta de alimentos y las colas, la presencia de evacuados y los 'paseos', aspectos todos que se hallan en la narrativa conocida como 'del terror rojo' de autores sublevados como Ana María de Foronda y Jacinto Miquelarena.

IKER GONZÁ LEZ-ALLENDE
University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Jeremy Squires' new edition of El camino, the third of Miguel Delibes' novels, first published in 1950, frames this text within an eco-critical context. The environmental interpretation he offers is thought provoking and an effective approach to take with contemporary students. Moreover, Anglophone students will surely appreciate the paratextual apparatus that Squires has assembled to smooth what may be their first foray into the linguistically rich and deceptively simple novelistic world of Delibes. The original Destino edition of the novel of course offers no linguistic, historical or cultural support for students of Spanish as a second language. The two previous teaching editions*one co-edited by Amor y Vá zquez and Kossof, the other by Polack*were published in 1960 and 1963 respectively, when Delibes had only just begun his trajectory as a novelist. They are now out of date and, more importantly, out of print. Squires' edition provides abundant linguistic and cultural footnotes in the main text, a thorough glossary, relevant cultural endnotes and meaningful questions for discussion. His critical analysis that introduces the edition is worthy of scholarly regard in its own right. Squires' annotated bibliography does not have the pretension of being exhaustive, but does provide information on editions of El camino and major critical studies of the novel*primarily monographs and not scholarly articles. He does reference Meyers' bibliography on Delibes, which is the most thorough to date.
The author begins by positing Delibes as a 'green writer'. Though the novel may have been dismissed by some critics as anti-progressive and conservative, exalting rural backwardness, Squires sees it as being 'as progressive in its social and moral discourse as it is innovative in its artistry' (2). Juxtaposing the 1950 novel with Delibes' inaugural address to the Spanish Royal Academy in 1975, Squires lays out Delibes' own assertion that El camino should be viewed*a quarter of a century later*as an intuitive precursor to the then incipient ecological movement. Squires explores the ambiguity of the novel with a nuanced approach. In 'Franco and the Peasantry', he disentangles Delibes' preoccupations about modernity and rurality from Francoist propaganda of the epoch, which first encouraged rural repopulation after the Civil War by idealizing country life and then pursued industrialization with its accompanying emigration from towns to cities (or to other European countries). Squires leads students to distinguish between Delibes' 'unromantic, realist, and non-ideological' view of Castile (8) from that of the Generation of '98, between Delibes' concern with conservation and the Regime's conservatism, and between Delibes' post-Vatican brand of Christianity and Franco's right-wing National Catholicism. El camino is not a city-mouse/country mouse novel, nor does Delibes dichotomize nature and culture. Squires perceives El camino to be more universally 'anti-authoritarian*anti-Western even*than it is anti-Franco' (11). Hence, the eco-critical reading of El camino as a green novel is rooted in a specific place and time and yet transcends them both.
Squires then proceeds to explore the genre of comedy in relation to El camino as a green novel. In 'A Comedy of Trials and Errors', he probes Delibes' depiction of the folly of naive children, with which any reader can identify, and the folly of adults 'who have grown deaf to the voice of their inner child' (13). He traces Delibes' roots as a newspaper caricaturist and how this plays out in various specific scenes of the novel.
Lastly, Squires posits El camino as a romantic comedy, from the young protagonist's implausible infatuation with the oblivious Mica, eleven years older than Daniel himself, to the reader's recognition that it is Uca-Uca who is Daniel's more natural partner. Daniel's social aspiration toward Mica parallels his father's insistence that Daniel leave his village community to achieve social mobility via education in the big city. Squires draws the parallel as well between Daniel's vacillation toward these two feminine figures and the intercalated story of Quino's choice of a fat or a thin bride.
'In El camino, Delibes gives romantic comedy a green twist' (27). We have come a long way from perceiving the novel as a series of unrelated vignettes in service to a conservative ideology rejecting progress. Miguel Delibes passed away on 12 March 2010. This edition is a fittingly multi-faceted homage to an author who is not easily categorized in the canon of twentieth-century Iberian literature in castellano. The first and only one of its kind, the present Companion fulfils a long overdue need for reference materials on Portuguese literature available in English. The rather compact volume is an informative guide aimed primarily at a university-level reading public with no previous or limited knowledge of Portuguese literature or of the language. Its editors, as well as most of its contributors, are professors and/or collaborate with research universities in England, where most were also trained. They have all published scholarly work on or closely related to the topics on which they write authoritatively and in a language accessible to non-specialized readers. Their essays, distributed throughout sixteen chapters of varying length and ordered chronologically, cover some of the most important movements, genres and authors in Portuguese literature, from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. They provide overviews of the material, basic historical, literary and cultural contextualization and just enough of the different authors' perspectives to make for, at times, critically engaging reading even for those familiar with the topic. After a brief Introduction written by the editors, the volume's opening chapter, 'Eight Centuries of Portuguese Literature: An Overview', presents in broad strokes the narrative of a literature seamlessly integrated into the changing political and cultural history of the nation. This chapter, the longest in the volume and one to which the reader of subsequent chapters may wish to return, is written in a creative and poetic style punctuated by an occasional ironic comment. The style here is as compelling as the stories the author artfully interconnects to tell the story of Portuguese literature over the course of eight centuries.
The fifteen chapters that follow elaborate, expand upon and add to the highlights referred to in the survey that opens the volume. As the reader would expect, the Portuguese high canon*from the Galician-Portuguese medieval lyric to the modernist Fernando Pessoa* is well represented, for the most part in relation to other contemporary authors both from Portugal and abroad and in relation to broader literary currents. Short but instructive chapters cover the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the latter being particularly well explained. The important poets of the turn of the twentieth century and, later, those anti-Salazar writers who emerged during the New State period, are missing from the collection. However, attention is given to what tends to be ignored by most Portuguese sources, namely, those women writers who began to emerge in the late nineteenth century and continued to spring up and to publish during the 1920s and throughout the decades that preceded the publication of the feminist 'scandal' of New Portuguese Letters. The penultimate chapter*not surprisingly the second longest in the volume*entitled 'Writing after the Dictatorship', is another impressively well-documented and cogently-argued study, which draws attention not only to the newness of the literature surveyed throughout all the different genres, but also to its ever-evolving aesthetic-political callings.
The Introduction is followed by a list of works on Portuguese literature in English, and each chapter ends with a relevant list of 'Works in Translation', but the total number of all titles in translation is not impressive. It is the last chapter in the volume that provides the historical narrative of how those translations (as well as a number of others) came about. Thus, the final chapter is as fundamental as the one which opens the volume. It constitutes a useful guide to which the reader looking for Portuguese literature available in English translation may wish to return.
The organization of the volume, with most chapters suggesting a continuum between the nation's history and literary history, and its exclusive focus on literature to the detriment of other cultural expressions may be open to critical questioning. But one must bear in mind that the present Companion is not intended for the theoretically sophisticated scholar. It is especially appropriate for undergraduate or graduate students seeking a basic secondary source on Portuguese literature in overview courses or for those studying on their own. It provides substantially more coverage and is greater in scope than the series of isolated works discussed in Spanish and Portuguese Literature and Their Times, Volume V of World Literature and Its Times, published in 2002 by the Gale Group. On the other hand, it does not engage in the critical debates that hinder the usefulness to the non-initiated of A Revisionary History of Portuguese Literature, edited by Pedro Tamen and Maria Helena Buescu in 1999. All in all, the present Companion to Portuguese Literature is a welcome and much-needed reference source that unassumingly and yet effectively introduces the canon to the nonspecialist reader, and, at the same time, questions it and challenges it in a manner that, and as the editors must surely wish, will attract new students to the study of Portuguese literature. ANA  The Nahua-speaking ethic communities of central Mexico left us the largest legacy of written documents of any New World indigenous people*literally thousands, the vast majority of which have never been studied. This splendid volume offers a rich array of the new research that reveals complex dimensions of the conquest of Mexico and refutes traditional versions of Spanish dominance and heroism. Their proud responses to the violence and negotiation of conquest were 'recorded in alphabetic writing that was quickly adopted by the natives and came to be used by them to conserve their culture and their communities [. . .] for both personal and political purposes' (6Á7). Susan Schroeder, distinguished scholar and editor of Nahua writings, deftly contextualizes the genre of conquest studies that has exploded the myth of 'a literature of ruin' and transformed our understanding of a 'new, vital literature produced by and for the natives themselves' (8). Nine essays examine views from their own altepetl (ethnic state) in annals, chronicles, tribute accounts, theatre pieces, confessionals and primordial titles in terms of what they recorded and why they did so. Each contribution deserves detailed review, but, unfortunately, this occasion can accommodate only brief comment. 'Three Views of the Conquest of Mexico from the Other Mexica', by Kevin Terracino takes a new look at three rare early documents composed by the Tlatelolca, who inhabited Mexico-Tenochtitlan's other altepetl on the island in the centre of the lake. Their vivid versions of the conquest recorded in 'The Annals of Tlatelolco', the 'List of Rulers' and Book XII of the Florentine Codex demonstrate that 'they were the great warriors [. . .] that the Mexica Tenocha were cowards, and that their ruler Quauhtemoc was the exemplary leader against the Spaniards' (8), contradicting the dominant narrative established by Cortés and Gómara (32). Throughout the sixteenth century artists from the ethnic state of Tlaxcala produced various pictorials in murals, bark paper, painting on cloth panels or lienzos as well as drawings and writings that depicted their alliance with the Spaniards to defeat their pre-contact enemies of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Travis Barton Kranz's 'Visual Persuasion: Sixteenth Century Tlaxcalan Pictorials in Response to the Conquest of Mexico' is the first study to analyse 'all of the Tlaxcalan conquest images known today to determine why the pictorial strategies changed so significantly in the sixteenth century' (46). She proposes that their 'increased emphasis on Christian conversion operated as pictorial ''spin'' to persuade the Spaniards of Tlaxcalan cooperation [. . .] not necessarily historical fact' (60Á61). 'The Destruction of Jerusalem as Colonial Nahuatl Historical Drama' by Louise M. Burkhart, illustrates a Nahua drama staged following the conquest as she compares the imported Spanish prose text with its dramaticized Nahuatl adaptation. This meticulous study concludes that '[t]he play, unmoored from its specific historical reference points and passed along among generations of Nahua performers, could be staged as a generic drama of conquest, victors and vanquished representing whomever the directors, performers, or observers wished to identify with or against. There is no single possible reading [. . .] The Mexica were not the only Nahuas who might see in Pilate and the Jews*overtly the villains of the piece*reflections of their own brutalization' (92).
In 'Chimalpahin Rewrites the Conquest: Yet Another Epic ''History''?', Susan Schroeder, the distinguished co-editor and co-translator of the Codex Chimalpahin and the Series Chimalpahinis compiled by the seventeenth-century Nahua annalist, translator, transcriber, Chimalpahin, points out that he 'is the only known native American author to have written an epic history of Indian Mexico in his own language and signed the work himself'(101). She shows how he transcribed, compared and reordered all of the extant pictorial manuscripts that he had gathered about his town Amecameca Chalco to write a history spanning the years 1160 to 1620 while from other pictorial annals he wrote about the founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan by the Mexica and their campaigns of conquests (103). 'There was for Chimalpahin a real urgency to confirm the antiquity and legitimacy of New Spain's first inhabitants. The history of the conquest need not be a literature of ruin but rather a new history ''born old'' ' (116). In 'Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Narratives of the Conquest of Mexico: Colonial Subjectivity and the Circulation of Native Knowledge', Amber Brian posits that although this mestizo's writings about his ancestral Tetzcoco 'clearly relied on native sources, his narratives were heavily informed by European discourses' (137). Camilla Townsend's analysis of 'Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza and the Notion of a Nahua Identity' demonstrates how 'micropatriotism' suffuses this Tlaxcalan noble's annals that recount the history of the altepetl through a record of cabildo business (154) as he represents 'his family, the subaltepetl of Quiahuiztlan, and the composite altepetl of Tlaxcala [. . .] that became the key elements of his identity as well as Tlaxcala's political identity' (155). Barry Sell's essay, ' ''Perhaps our Lord, God, has Forgotten Me''. Intruding into the Colonial Nahua (Aztec) Confessional', opens a unique window onto intimate experiences of Nahua personal life in the sample responses from Nahua confessionals that the great Jesuit grammarian, Horacio Carochi recorded as teaching aids for his fellow missionaries. A riveting response by a female penitent sought harmony in social relationships; while yet another relates a chilling tale of familial cruelty (195Á96).
Chapters 8 and 9 offer significant discussions of other native writing genres; the late seventeenth-or early eighteenth-century títulos primordiales, calendrical texts and probanzas. 'Representations of Spanish Authority in Zapotec Calendrical and Historical Genres' by David Tavá rez focuses on evangelization, extirpation and native writing practices in the town of Villa Alta de San Ildefonso, inhabited by speakers of Zapotec, Chinantec and Mixe. These radically distinct indigenous genres, 'cannot be understood through the received dichotomy of myth versus history' (221). Robert Haskett's 'Conquering the Spiritual Conquest in Cuernavaca' reveals how the authors of these títulos primordiales produced elaborate documents in which they depicted themselves as the true agents of spiritual rehabilitation after the Spanish conquest: 'When Cuauhnahuac became Cuernavaca, the new Faith entered, rather than conquered, a pre-existing and equally vibrant sacred system that changed, but did not entirely unravel during the recreation of the villa's sacred tapestry' (247).
This volume sets a high benchmark for the depth and richness of its study of documents that recorded the Nahua 'genre of conquest', many analysed here for the first time. As Terracino points out, '[l]ike all Nahua writings about the Conquest of Mexico, these accounts tell particular stories from the point of view of a single altepetl. There is not a single, homogeneous indigenous, Nahua, Aztec, or even Mexican account of the conquest' (35). These results of brilliant archival research and Nahuatl discourse analysis are superbly written; their arguments finely nuanced and jargon free. The volume brims with new texts and ideas that inspire future work and debates.

MAUREEN AHERN
Ohio State University. Moreover, Gonzá lez Espitia problematizes the idea of canonicity through the metaphor of the carnero, which is a supplement to and an extension of the open archive. This is, ultimately, the 'dark side' of the archive to which the title of his book refers. Gonzá lez Espitia's rethinking of canonicity through the metaphor of a dual chambered archive, one public and official, and the other hidden and spectral, is designed to account for the ways that texts too ambiguous, contradictory or pessimistic to be classified under Sommer's concept of the foundational fiction are indeed revelatory about the contradictory processes of Spanish-American modernization: 'Their perceived marginality gives them strength to define surreptitiously the contours of the open archive [. . .] It is only after being displaced toward the carnero that they can be studied now as part of the dialogue of the constitution of the nineteenth-century Spanish American nation' (22). The foundational/ non-foundational dichotomy is thus replaced by a more fluid and subtle mechanism for understanding literature and culture, one predicated on indeterminacy, mutability and even contradiction. In fact, Gonzá lez Espitia's original and provocative concept of the carnero is not unlike the unconscious; the dark side of the archive is negated and denied, but it cannot be separated causally or conceptually from the more brightly lit, self-conscious public archive. Unlike Roberto Gonzá lez Echeverría's important work Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1990), Gonzá lez Espitia emphasizes the ways in which the archive (containing both its public chamber, and hidden one, the carnero) is not only a constructive mechanism, but also a device for making texts spectral. In other words, the texts in the annex are hidden yet undeniably present.
Gonzá lez Espitia the archivist enters the annex to retrieve several notable works of literature to explore as case studies of that darkness and elusive quality that have banished them to the carnero. These works are marked by literary decadentism, which Gonzá lez Espitia defines vis-à -vis the concepts of pessimism, escapism, unproductive genealogies, synesthesia, the archetype of the sensual, fatal woman and an excess of individuality. 'These literary documents promise nothing to the reader', argues Gonzá lez Espitia; 'after the last page there is neither hope nor faith, because hopelessness and lack of belief are their flesh and blood' (33). Because these are texts that do not imagine a rosy future for the nation or for the continent, they cannot be easily examined through the dominant lens of Sommer's model. In chapters dedicated to José Martí, José María Vargas Vila, Clemente Palma, Horacio Quiroga and Fernando Vallejo, Gonzá lez Espitia dwells on the different ways in which these nonfoundational texts from the carnero diagnose the contradictions of modernity, explore the threatening power of sensuality and dwell on the negation of personal agency or fully realized social and political systems.
In the chapter on José Martí, Gonzá lez Espitia argues that Lucía Jerez (1911/1969) is illsuited for reductive classification as a single work of literature because it is haunted by its first version, the pseudonymous novel Amistad funesta (1885) by Adelaida Rael. Besides manifesting Martí's evolving views of liberated women, Lucía Jerez also imagines a social order that is centrifugal rather than centripetal, atomistic rather than centralized. The critic also argues that José María Vargas Vila's provocative and bestselling novel Lirio negro (1920) cannot be read as foundational fiction because hysteria, not teleological history, is the basis of his story, and of his critique of the failures of modernity. As in Lucía Jérez, fragmentation, spectrality, mutilation, 'reformulation' and open-ended experimentation or ambiguity marks Lirio negro and other texts under study as liminal and changeable, resistant to prescriptive, symbolic nationalisms. Other chapters provocatively trace Horacio Quiroga's attempts both to disclose and hide a venereal condition he suffered from (either gonorrhea or syphilis, or both), Clemente Palma's exploration of blood as the matrix of progress and decadence, and Fernando Vallejo's status as a member of the dark annex of the carnero.
On the Dark Side of the Archive is an original book in both content and tone. Gonzá lez Espitia performs excellent feats of literary and cultural detection in examining the work of canonical and lesser-known writers, providing new insights and even surprising discoveries about their lives and obsessions. Besides this contribution, our author has proposed an exciting, new framework for other scholars of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Spanish-American literature to utilize in their scholarship. Furthermore, Gonzá lez Espitia has embraced the idea that form and content should be intertwined. His scholarly voice is vigorous, dramatic, personal and full of colour. Whereas the 'light side' of the archive*its main, public and officially sanctioned reading room*is populated by the conventions of flattened academic prose, Gonzá lez Espitia's own voice emerges from the annex, energetic and electric, changeable and surprising, reminding us of what is lost and repressed, hidden and denied in our scholarly practice.
Pocos estudiosos han advertido las contradicciones que conlleva tal prá ctica; sin embargo, el hecho de que Salvador no lleve a cabo una cuidadosa disección entre lo ético y lo estético en la obra de Borges no le resta mérito a la tercera parte del libro, que es donde verdaderamente se hace un aporte sustancial al tema. Es cierto que hay una ruptura entre el exclusivo énfasis en lo estético como base de la aproximación de Borges a la Biblia, y el abrupto cambio a la esfera ético-existencial que domina el aná lisis de la ú ltima parte. Pienso que esto se explica por el enfoque metodológico del autor, quien primero se ocupa de la recepción de la Biblia en Borges, para luego encargarse de los modos de su apropiación. Si en la valoración literaria predomina lo estético, en la reescritura se proyecta ante todo la dimensión ético-existencial que el autor ha percibido en los libros sagrados. De ahí, justamente, el enfoque trá gico en los personajes bíblicos que Salvador juzga fundamentales en la obra de Borges, a saber, Qohélet (el Eclesiastés), Adá n, Caín, Cristo y Judas. El aná lisis que presenta el autor tiene aquí muchísimos méritos. Aparte de la claridad en la exposición, Salvador se acerca al tema con sensibilidad y originalidad. Destaca, entre otros aspectos, la preocupación de Borges por la pesadumbre de la existencia, la cuestión de la justicia divina y la retribución en el má s allá , el determinismo, la muerte y la relatividad moral. La mayor parte de los textos estudiados en esta sección han sido extraídos de la obra poética de Borges, con lo cual Salvador da prueba de la fundamental distinción entre las ficciones borgeseanas y la poesía, á mbito ideal del pensamiento prá ctico en el que se revela la fragilidad del ser humano. HUMBERTO  This collection of essays originated as a conference hosted by the Cervantes Institute in London in 2004. The book is divided into two parts, the first devoted to Alfredo Bryce Echenique and the second, subtitled with the catch-all 'Essays on Peruvian Literature and Culture', includes four essays on other Peruvian writing and history. The Bryce Echenique section includes articles by several recognized specialists on his work, particularly César Ferreira, David Wood and James Higgins. Higgins' essay on 'inadaptados' opens the volume with an analysis of Bryce Echenique's common protagonist who 'por su temperamento se muestra incapaz de asumir los valores imperantes y como consecuencia no logra integrarse socialmente ni triunfar en la vida' (10). Through pertinent fictional examples of social class tensions, Higgins reveals the politics behind Bryce Echenique's writing. Ferreira's essay offers a chronological overview of Bryce Echenique's work to bring out some common themes, noting in particular that his protagonists are 'buscando siempre un lugar para ser y estar en el mundo' (25). Wood's essay, in my view the most substantial contribution to the section, discusses the role of popular culture (soccer, cinema, music) in Bryce Echenique's writing. He problematizes the terms to offer a well-documented definition that avoids the polarizing 'popular versus elite', and positions the popular within politics and society, 'para cuestionar las relaciones de poder' (35). Helene Price's long essay on the implied reader in the novel Huerto de mi amada provides a close reading of irony and parody. Her rather traditional approach is meticulous but rambling and lacks a conclusion. The section closes with an interview by David Wood with Bryce Echenique, where the author discusses his travels and his writing. In some of the most endearing and insightful moments of the interview, Bryce confirms many of the points the scholars have touched on in their essays such as his admission that he writes 'digresivamente, abundantemente, espontá neamente' (72), creating 'un lazo afectivo, fraternal' with the reader (70). When asked about his cultural and national identification as a writer, a preoccupation of many critics of his work, Bryce responds that he avoids national labels but admits that his attachment to Peru persists: 'no es un recuerdo; es una vivencia que se busca y que se vive, que aparece en todo lo que hacemos' (67).
The volume offers no commentary or introduction to Part II, which would have buffered the lack of cohesion due to the four essays' rather disparate topics. Two essays on Peruvian poetry, by Jason Wilson on César Moro and by David Bellis on Javier Heraud, link these writers to political and artistic movements outside of Peru. Wilson's wellreferenced approach to Moro elaborates biographical elements along with recognizing Moro's 'singlehanded' promotion of surrealism (78). Bellis' sociohistorical overview of Heraud's brief life and work emphasizes the influence on him of the Cuban Revolution. Robert Barker's 'The ''Disappeared'' Incas', an historiographic study of colonial sequencing theories, stands out as a misplaced essay in this collection. The final piece, Stephen Hart's intricate and stimulating essay on metaphor versus metonym in Peruvian writing and culture, offers readers a sophisticated analysis with examples from colonial chronicles to Arguedas and Vallejo.
Within this wide array of topics, some common threads appear. The essays on Bryce Echenique, for example, underscore his oral style and humour, elaborate on his exploration of racial and social class tensions in Peruvian culture, stress his debt to Ricardo Palma and Julio Ramón Ribeyro, demonstrate the reader as a narrative accomplice, and examine Bryce's relationship with Europe in constructing his Peruvian identity. The essays in Part II share very little connection. The editors of the volume should have spent more time correcting errors, eliminating repetitions among the essays, omitting essays that do not coherently fit, and providing more extensive bibliography for further consultation. This last point is of major concern, since readers interested in Bryce Echenique, in particular, have only the footnoted references in the articles. None of the contributors reference the substantial volume co-edited by César Ferreira and Ismael Má rquez, Los mundos de Alfredo Bryce Echenique: nuevos textos críticos (Lima: Pontificia Univ. Católica del Perú , 2003), nor do they reference Jorge Marcone's important study of orality in Peruvian writing, La oralidad escrita. Sobre la reivindicación y re-inscripción del discurso oral (Lima: Pontificia Univ. Católica del Perú , 1997), where he devotes a chapter to Bryce Echenique. The absence of a bibliography of Bryce Echenique's works as well as of selected critical studies limits the value of this book to scholars and students. The volume does pull off a poetic sweep, by beginning with an exploration of Bryce Echenique and concluding with Hart's example of Vallejo and Arguedas who 'see language as a Colosseum in which cultural agents, armed with the weapons of rhetoric, wage battle to the death' (135). While it might be an exaggeration to claim that Bryce Echenique is battling to the death, the stakes are high and language is always his tool as well as his weapon in confronting Peru's social class inequities and in searching for a place 'para ser y estar en el mundo'.

MARCY SCHWARTZ
Rutgers University, New Jersey.
privileges are not protected in the same way as those of the Chilean military. But*like Chile*if Costa Rica institutions are relatively robust, that owes a great deal to some fairly distant historical endowments. Few in Costa Rica believe that their relative 'success' (tarnished for reasons that are well explained in the chapter) is easily transferrable across their northern and southern borders (i.e., Honduras and Nicaragua). But they, like the Chileans, fear and resist contagion from their less flourishing neighbours.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso provides a third vignette of Brazil. Concentrating on innovations in governance during the 1990s (when he was the dominant policymaker) he stresses the inherently country-specific nature of the choices that were made. This again, brings into question the utility of the initial ranking exercise. But, in any case, why does Brazil not rank above the Latin-American median? As far as I can tell, its poor score is pulled down by two quite misleading indicators. The 'inflation' 1992Á2006 figure is poor, because inflation was not controlled until 1994, but thereafter Brazil was a truly impressive success story. The 'jobs in the formal sector' figure is also unusually bad, but again what needs stressing is the direction and rate of improvement, not the low initial starting point.
Evelyn Huber and John D.
Stephens contribute a comparative chapter on successful social policy regimes that helps explain why Argentina*despite all the palpable failings both of its democracy and of its governance system over virtually the whole of the twentieth century*gets its place on the positive side of the ledger in this collection.
Overall, this volume is an important reference-point for comparisons, but its rankings are open to debate, and a variety of alternative evaluations remain worthy of further exploration.